Calling it now. There's only one way to pull a Jim Kirk and destroy any crazed supercomputer that monitors time which says certain people have to die in order to "save the future": Ask it "Who is Donna Troy?" The thing will fold like a deck chair.

Er...if the Renegades disqualify anyone with a criminal ancestor in the last 400 years, who could possibly qualify? The chances of all 20,000 or so of your ancestors having no criminal record is pretty much zero. Hell, given the current felony conviction rate in the US, any 25th-century American will have a few hundred convicted felons among their ancestors from the 21st century alone.

And while I'm snarking, why would a bunch of cops call themselves the "Renegades?" That's like, even eviller than "Rogues."

Piss ourselves from laughter, perhaps - bats don't rate high on the list of scary things in Australia (even for the cowardly and superstitious lot) unless you're a fruit farmer, as fruit bats are our most well known bat here. Now if he was Blue-Ringed-Octopusman or Funnel-Web-Spiderman or Brown-Snakeman, we might start quaking...

(Also, most of us got over the convict thing a long time ago - the majority of us look with amused pity on people who try to use that to insult us. It was 200 years ago guys, get a new insult.)

That's a reason to change the past? Past grandparent, they've almost certainly never met them, and have only slightly more emotion invested in them than any other historically criminal, that is to say, practically none at all, most people nowadays would have to break out a book to name all of their great grandparents. If they pass the "doesn't meddle in the past for petty reasons," part of the check, then they should be fine.

"People who have evil parents/ancestors turn evil," is a theme that's cropped up in DC fairly often too. Even when it makes no sense, if someone has an evil parent they get to go through forced villainizations. Future Starmen apparently have an 'evil gene' that crops up occasionally due to having some villain ancestry in them too (that last for over *800 thousand years*), for a blatant example. Even characters who are supposed to be a direct subversion of it (like Cassandra Cain and Miss Martian) often get brief villainizations because they were "meant to be evil."

Johns explained it away in Rebirth that the Speed Force slows down or reverses the aging process or some such. That's why Jay and Joan Garrick (canonically close to a 100) look 40 years younger than they are and why Iris has gotten younger now that Barry's back (as if the 30 years she spend raising her kids/grandkids in the future never happened).

If they want to keep the timeline intact why would they give time travel technology to someone who has a reason to want to go back and change things?

They don't want to keep the timeline intact. The Renegades approve of altering the past by erasing crimes from history; in this issue Commander Cold condemns Barry for not using his time-travel powers to fix the past.

And a "no criminal ancestry" rule wouldn't be particularly helpful for preventing people from messing with the past anyway. Of all the reasons to change the past--undo the Holocaust, prevent your beloved grandmother from getting cancer, prevent your enemies' parents from conceiving them--stopping your asshole great-great-great-grandfather from committing a crime isn't exactly the highest priority for most of us.

I've got to think that, given how recently Johns was writing Booster's book, it can't be simple coincidence that a bunch of time cops from Booster's century are the new big bads here. Really hope we get to see some clan Carter dimension to Flashpoint.

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